Passing the Night
by Allekha
Summary: In the aftermath of Aoi's death, Itsuki tries to cope as the new master of the Mononokean.


A/N: Written for augusta_brie for Trick or Treat 2016; November hit me like a hurricane and I forgot to crosspost after authors were revealed.

* * *

The first time Haruitsuki entered the Mononokean after Aoi's funeral, it felt too silent and empty.

It shouldn't have. He had spent much time here alone before, and the space was usually this clear, and the Mononokean itself was a familiar presence around him. And yet.

 _Din-rin_

 _Welcome back, Itsuki_

Usually the Mononokean would add some cheerful kaomoji to the statement, but today there was none.

 _How was it?_

"Fine." He put his shoes – black as the rest of his funeral wear, where it wasn't pure white – and pulled out a piece of convenience store bread. He wasn't hungry, but he hadn't eaten in a long time – not today, certainly – and it was there. "It was small."

Aoi wouldn't have wanted a huge funeral where everyone who had ever been helped by the Mononokean came wailing, so it had been downright tiny, limited to those Aoi had known well.

The Justice, who had kept shooting him worried looks; the Legislator, who had been for once entirely serious through the entire ceremony; the Executive, who had barely glanced at Itsuki the whole time; Koura, who had looked strange in her funeral wear, worn very properly, rather than her usual flashy outfit; and a couple of others.

It had been small. Intimate. Not that long, probably.

It didn't make Aoi any more _gone_ than before, but it almost felt that way.

The bread tasted stale and chalky, and the sweet red-bean filling made him feel sick. When he finished choking it down, he set his futon out even though it was only early evening and crawled into bed. The Mononokean snuffed out the light, and despite his exhaustion, it took him too long to fall asleep.

~!~

He jerked awake to the sound of his cell phone playing a soft melody. It took some fumbling to turn it off, and he stared at the screen for a few seconds trying to remember what the alarm was for.

Oh. School.

There had never been a time when Itsuki had felt less like going to school.

Anyway, he had already missed nearly the entire week, and it was a Saturday half-day. He set the phone aside again and went back to sleep.

When he woke up again, it was much later in the day, and the Mononokean had brightened up a little – not quite enough to wake him by itself, but enough to encourage him to get up when he did. Itsuki just turned over and tried to fall asleep again. He was vaguely hungry, but the thought of eating anything made him nauseous; he was tired, but not enough to sleep even more; he mostly wanted to just stop existing for a while to halt the constant stream of thoughts going _Aoi, Aoi, Aoi didn't have to die, you killed –_

He didn't fall asleep again, but laying there felt good, and thus it was more than two hours before he finally dragged himself out of bed. His head felt muzzy, and sitting up made him a bit dizzy after laying down for so long.

His phone cheeped at him. It was a reminder to take his medicine. He didn't really need it any longer, and he would have turned the notifications off long ago, except it had seemed to make Aoi feel better.

Medicine. Water. He thought about making tea. He didn't; it seemed like too much effort. There wasn't anything left to eat even if he had wanted to.

He did put his futon away, because it was the thing to do after getting up, and kept one of the blankets out, because the room felt too chilled despite the fact that the Mononokean was always the same temperature.

 _Din-rin_

 _Itsuki, are you cold?_

"Just a little," he said. "It's fine." He opened his schoolbag and pulled out the homework he had picked up when he _had_ gone to school; there was nothing else to do right now, and perhaps work would make him feel better. It was usually this quiet when he did schoolwork, Aoi not wanting to distract him when it could be avoided.

 _Do you want it warmer?_

"It's fine," he repeated, but he paused to stroke the fiber of the tatami as he spread his homework out.

He was pretty sure the room turned a little warmer anyway as he opened his math textbook to a random page and flipped through it aimlessly until he hit the right section.

~!~

He slept through most of Sunday and woke up too early on Monday morning. He still wasn't hungry, but his hands shook as he got ready for the day, and he felt dizzy when he stood, so perhaps it was time to find something to eat. _Have a good day at school_ , the Mononokean wished him as he finished buttoning his uniform.

On wandering into the nearest bakery, he stared at the racks of bread – melon bread, panda-shaped bread, red bean-filled bread – and tried to figure out what he wanted. Plain rice might have been fine. He ended up picking up a croissant and a sesame-covered bun, which he managed to choke down in small pieces while sitting on a bench.

The girl who sat next to him stared as he slid into his seat, but at least she didn't bother him, just turned and whispered to her friend sitting behind her. He in turn ignored her and played with his phone for the few remaining minutes before homeroom.

The announcements drifted by in a blur, and afterward their teacher came up to his desk. "Abeno-kun," she murmured over the din of the other students breaking out their textbooks and whining about homework. "Can I speak to you for a moment?"

Out in the hallway, she frowned at him. "Have you been sick? You don't seem like the type to be a delinquent, but you missed almost all of last week, and nobody called us. We even tried calling your parents, but nobody answered," she chided as the math teacher approached, pausing before the classroom doors to listen as well. "We were worried that something had happened to you. I realize that if you're very ill it might be difficult to think about these things, but somebody needs to let us know these things."

"There was a sudden death in the family."

His teacher's eyes went wide and her hand flew to her mouth. "Oh!" she said after a moment. "I'm sorry to hear that. I can... it's understandable that these things might slip everyone's mind, then."

"...sorry," Itsuki said. Her worried look was too much, and he dropped his gaze. "I did the homework."

"Well," she said quietly, and it took him a second to realize that she was speaking to the math teacher. "As long as he finishes the work and keeps up his grades, it should be fine, shouldn't it?"

"I don't see why not," he replied. "Your family is from Kyoto, aren't they? It must have been difficult traveling all that way on top of everything."

"Are they?" his teacher asked. "That _is_ a ways. I'll talk to the other teachers – come by the teacher's room after school is finished and I'll give you the work that you missed. I did try to send it to you, but several of your classmates said they couldn't find the address, and I suppose you wouldn't have been home anyway, huh."

Itsuki let himself be nudged back into the classroom while the teachers continued to chatter on without him.

For once, even he couldn't sleep through every class – probably due to the fact that he had spent the majority of the weekend in bed – and he spent most of the day staring at whatever textbook they were using and half-listening to the teacher's lecture. It was enough to distract his mind until the day was over.

"Here you go," said his homeroom teacher as she handed him a stack of paper in the teacher's lounge. "We've given you a bit of extra time to work on everything there. Are you holding up alright?"

"I'm fine," he said, flicking through the papers. "Thank you."

She gave him another pitying look. "Let us know if you need anything else. We're here to help you, okay?"

He nodded and slipped away, back into the Mononokean.

 _Din-rin_

 _Itsuki! Welcome back (_ _)_

Once he had set his school things down, he checked the appointment book and was at once both a little glad and a little disappointed to see that the next one wasn't for three days. He didn't want to have the tell the client – one he knew, one who would be expecting to catch up with Aoi – that Aoi was gone; on the other hand, it would provide a good distraction for the part of his brain constantly repeating what had happened and looking for a way to save Aoi.

He closed the book and sighed, feeling exhausted. Belatedly, he remembered he hadn't eaten lunch. If he didn't eat, he would be in no condition to open a portal to the Underworld, or to properly help a client. He might as well go grocery shopping before attempting any schoolwork.

~!~

The appointment went fine. The client asked after Aoi, and on hearing that he was the new master of the Mononokean, put things together and hid her face behind her sleeve for the next few minutes, but didn't pry. So went things with the next appointment, and the next; he got the words out without inflection, without thinking to hard about what they meant.

School went fine. He finally turned in all the work he had missed and got a 95 on the next history text. The homeroom teacher didn't bother him again, and she stopped paying special attention soon enough.

He got used to the quiet of the Mononokean's room, to performing all of the duties by himself. When he didn't have an appointment, he could go the whole day without speaking, or only uttering a few words if he was called on in English class.

The fall leaves turned into winter frost. The teachers reminded them constantly about how they had to study for their high school entrance exams, making his classmates stress and whine during breaks while arranging study dates.

Itsuki already knew which school he was going to apply to, and unlike what some of his fellow students dreamed of, it wasn't a fancy top-tier school meant to funnel him into Toudai or another top university, just a normal school. If he did as well as he did on normal exams, it wouldn't be a problem getting in.

(Really, he didn't see the point in going to high school – not when he already had a job that he would have for the rest of his life – but.

But Aoi, for whatever reason, had wanted him to go.)

A human client called and asked him to come by her new house, worried that it was haunted. She'd gone on entirely too long about what her grandfather had said when he moved in with her and had been vague about the details of what was actually going on. Itsuki took the job anyway, though it was unclear if there was a youkai, a ghost, or nothing but some imagined frights.

 _Din-rin_

 _Itsuki, I've been wondering something_

He looked up from where he was scratching notes into his appointment book. "Yes?"

 _I..._

 _Are you alright? You didn't get sick again?_

He set the pen down. "No. Why did you think so?"

 _Lately you've been really quiet. When you were talking just now, it was the first time I heard you in a while. You've only ever been so quiet when you were sick and said your throat hurt too much to talk._

Guilt rose up. "Sorry. I didn't mean to make you worry. I'm not... it's just..."

Before he figure out what he wanted to say, the wind chime rang again. _I miss Aoi too._

Of course it did; how long had Aoi worked here? He had never found out.

 _Do you want to talk about what happened?_

"What's there to say about it?" He looked back down at the book and hastily started to read off what he had written, interjecting complaints about the woman's inability to tell him anything and searching for places where he could ask the Mononokean's opinion, which it gave happily and with no mention of the subject change.

He wondered later, curled under his blankets and unable to escape the subject now that he was trying to go to sleep, if the Mononokean had been trying to make him feel better, or if he'd unfairly taken away its chance to talk about it and get its own feelings out. It wasn't like there was another employee it could have that conversation with. He still couldn't make himself bring it up again the next day.

~!~

The woman's house, it turned out, had no ghosts, but it was lousy with youkai. The most obvious had been a pair of zashiki-warashi, potentially annoying but ultimately harmless. The woman's grandfather, to Itsuki's surprise, could see them, and he smiled as one of them chased a ball down the hallway and the other followed Itsuki around with wide, curious eyes.

"You're not gonna make us go away, are you?" the child asked, his red face scrunched tight. The other one, a young girl with short hair, looked up from her ball at the end of the hallway.

"If you don't want to go to the Underworld and you aren't hurting anyone over here, I have no reason to force you to go," Itsuki reassured them. "There are many youkai that still prefer to remain in the human world."

Both of them burst into huge grins at that. "Good!" shouted the boy. "'cause this is our house! But I think the other one wants to leave."

"Other one?"

They led him into the garden, where a faint moaning could be heard, and with the woman's help he dug and found the source: a very old iron kettle rusting away. Perhaps a previous house had burned down here, or it had been mistakenly thrown away; in any case, when they pulled it out, to Itsuki's eyes a young man rose from the spout.

The woman looked confused as Itsuki talked to him, but she didn't ask any stupid questions – not that there was much to interrupt. The kettle spirit was quiet and kept looking around as if expecting something or someone, but there was apparently nothing more to bind him here, and when Itsuki offered to send him to the Underworld, he merely bowed his head.

"Um, I'll go make you tea and make sure I have your payment," the woman said, before leaving them alone.

The zashiki-warashi rampaged around the house as he had his tea and checked the payment. At this time of year, the sun was already set went he glanced out the window, especially after all of the time it had taken to dig the kettle spirit out of the nearly frozen ground. All of a sudden, one of the child-spirits skidded to a halt and shivered. "I don't like this one," she whined, clutching Itsuki's sleeve. "She's scary. Can you make _her_ go away?"

The grandfather frowned at that but didn't seem to notice the third presence that was slowly arising at the other end of the house.

"There's another one," Itsuki told the woman as he stood. His research had turned up nothing useful – no murders, no odd reports, nothing so much that indicated that a needle spirit might have been stuck to the place. "The zashiki-warashi said that it's a scary woman. Do you have any idea...?"

She glanced at her grandfather and shook her head. "The sellers lived here with their children, and they just said they wanted to move so the children could go to a better high school, and the neighbors didn't say anything."

Teenagers, though, could get up to many stupid things. It didn't take long to realize which of those it could be when he entered the room that had previously been full of nothing but the woman's painting supplies. Hanging in the middle of the room, still translucent but becoming more solid was a blue lantern ghost, the kind that was only summoned by telling a hundred ghost stories.

They must have thought it was harmless fun. Maybe they hadn't even been able to see her when she appeared – her pale blue skin, her long hair floating above an invisible draft, her sapphire kimono with its long sleeves swinging, the horns poking out above her grinning face full of sharp teeth.

It took Itsuki over an hour – at least – to talk her down and convince her to go back to the Underworld. He didn't need to use his influence, but it was a near thing several times as she rushed at him, teeth bared, or circled him with her hair or her sleeves threatening to coil about him.

He stumbled into the kitchen afterward, so exhausted from opening the doors twice that he didn't register a single word the woman said to him, or the cheers from the zashiki-warashi dancing around him that would have washed her out anyway. He nodded and nodded, feeling like he was about to faint, made his excuses to leave, took the envelope she pushed into his hand, and left.

He woke up to the sound of his phone chirping at him. After poking blindly at the screen for a few minutes, too bleary to read, he registered that it was his school alarm, that he was back in the Mononokean, and that he was going to go back to sleep.

When he woke up later, he looked around, confused for several moments, before settling back against the wall and sinking his head to his knees.

 _Din-rin_

 _Itsuki! You finally woke up. Was it a tough job? You must have had to open the doors twice, didn't you. ( ´△_ _)_

It wasn't the first time this had happened. But before, Aoi had been there to greet him good-morning or good-afternoon, to prepare him tea and hand him a hot meal, to make sure he hadn't gone and made himself sick. Aoi would check that he didn't have a fever and tell the Mononokean to look after him if there was a job that couldn't be put off. If there wasn't, Aoi would stroke his hair until the headache went away and talk to him in a low, soothing voice, often telling him tales of long ago, that worked better than anything to clear the cobwebs from his brain.

Itsuki couldn't remember the last time when he'd felt so awful – so physically ill – and not had at least a warm cup of tea waiting for him, if Aoi had needed to leave in a hurry, and a concerned note telling him to feel better soon.

He buried his head further into his knees as his eyes grow hot. _Don't don't don't_ he thought but the tears welled up anyway. For the first time since before the funeral, he quietly began to cry.

The whole time, he wished it was over, and when his breath finally stopped hitching of its own accord, he felt blank. Empty. He raised his head and scrubbed at his face with a sleeve.

 _Din-rin_

 _Itsuki?_

"I'm fine," he told the Mononokean, his voice hoarse, then remembering how he had treated it before, added, "I was just remembering how Aoi used to help me when this happened before."

 _So you did have to open them twice! You were sooooo tired when you came back yesterday, you didn't get my name right at all._

Despite himself, the corner of his mouth twitched up, and he ran a hand along the mats. "It's the intention that counts." When it didn't say anything further, he asked, "Did you want to hear about what happened?"

 _Yes! Tell me everything~_

He told the story as he made his own tea and dug up something to eat that would help him recover the lost energy.

 _You handled it really well! I'm so proud of you! You're able to take on all kinds of jobs now._

He only caught what it said next a few moments later because he happened to glance up as he settled back to eat.

 _If Aoi had to –_

It was immediately replaced with _I'm glad that Itsuki was here to become my new master, but I just wondered now, what if next time you get hurt?_

"It's not like I take on dangerous cases," he said. "Even if the blue lantern ghost had attacked me, I could have commanded her to step down without a problem."

 _Yes, but –_

 _At least, Aoi usually had at least one employee. Like you! It helped get cases done and sometimes having a second person could be really useful._

"I remember," he said. "Aoi would tell me about them sometimes." His throat closed; he swallowed half of his tea, and it sort of seemed to work. At least his eyes weren't threatening to tear up again. "Are you saying I should find one?"

 _I think it would be nice to have someone else along. At least, they could make sure you don't get stranded when you exhaust yourself._

"I'll think about it. I have exams coming up, so I don't have time to search for someone right now."

 _Okay~ Take your time and feel better first. You still look really tired, do you need to sleep more?_

He nodded, and the lighting dimmed. "Thanks."

He lay down and cocooned himself in blankets. It took him a while to fall asleep, but for once it was because he was thinking of how one went about recruiting employees for helping out youkai.


End file.
